Archetypes are
built around a certain core principle, which is the summation of a particular
gendered abstraction. Stereotypes are a limiting oversimplification or a
popularization of gender archetypes, and while stereotypes might partially draw
on the archetypes for some element of truth, they end up being much narrower in
their application. To formulate it simply, one can understand gender archetypes
as the highest common denominator of ideal gender qualities universally
understood, whereas gender stereotypes are the lowest common reduced
denominator, but they are drawn from the archetype. Another way to put it is that
the archetype is the starting place whereas the stereotype is the end place of
narrow, culture-bound application. These stereotypes become laws unto
themselves that coerce people into a prison of man-made regulations. I tend to
agree that stereotypes are enslaving and culture-bound. We gravitate toward
wanting simple answers and applications to the question: “What does it mean to
be a man/woman?” We can shipwreck against them in our identity formation when
we put too much stock in them. We have been set on a collision course with
stereotypes since Western individualistic cultures, especially, have moved
further away from traditional ones which often had an archetypical
understanding of gender at their center. The only way to avoid self-destruction
is to choose to either embrace them fully or change course radically. On the
one hand, the most wholesale human sacrifice offered to stereotypes has come
from the transgender movement. A transgender person is a victim of
absolute tyranny of stereotypical male or female behavior and he or she is
willing to undergo self-mutilation to be subject to its demands. By this, I
mean that the measure by which a person who feels like he or she is actually of
the other sex is usually stereotypical. A girl who prefers stereotypical boy
activities such as mechanics or certain sports and feels the pressure from
parents and friends to conform, feels she is of the “wrong” gender, instead of
embracing that it could be possible, normal, and acceptable to oneself and
others for a girl to have such interests. On the other hand, the opposite way
for individualistic cultures of dealing with enslaving stereotypes is moving
away from gender binaries altogether. If there are no binaries, there are no
“right” or “wrong” expressions of gender and hence no stereotyping possible
anymore.
One of the main
attacks launched against the Bible and main reason for its rejection is the
accusation that it promotes stereotypical behavior for the sexes. We do not
find the idea of an archetypical man or a woman separate from real embodied men
and women in the Bible. Perfection is found in God alone and his reality is
known by us inasmuch as he reveals it to us and gives us eyes to see it. We now
see dimly, as in a mirror, but when we see reality through God’s lens, we are
able to see things as they line up with reality, even as finite beings unable
to grasp all of God’s greatness. His plan in Christ was to break into our
“phenomenal,” our immanence, our gendered experience and rescue men and women
to be made perfect for all eternity. The apostle Paul writes that we do have an
intuitive sort of knowledge of God given to all men and women through natural
revelation which leaves us with no excuse as to God’s existence and gives a
sense of normative human sexuality as well. Our spirituality and our sexuality
are hence connected:
For
what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.
For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have
been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things
that have been made. So, they are without excuse. For although they knew
God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became
futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to
be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the
immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and
creeping things. Therefore, God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to
impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they
exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature
rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! (Romans 1:19-24)
This means we
have an innate sense that there is a divine, perfect creator and moral
standards that supersede our limited perceptions and hence we also can deduce
that there are moral standards that affect the right way to be a
gendered person. Paul explains that nature is our teacher and reveals the
natural order of the sexes and their interaction. A rejection of nature and the
sexuality God gave us is a rejection of God himself. A life true to his reality
and revelation is one of true humility before God through the act of acceptance
of our given gender as coming from God. We are born as male or female
regardless of how we feel about it.[1]This
is not a popular view to hold and those who do will be increasingly be accused
of all sorts of bigotry. Because of the firm view of binary gender in the
Bible, most people also assume it is nothing but stereotypical and hence,
reject it. But in fact, it is neither stereotypical nor is even archetypical.
When we look through the Bible, it presents us with many different types of men
and women, none of whom are perfect and all of whom live, and sin, in their
gendered bodies and hence, need salvation. The greatest “heroes” of the Bible
are terribly flawed, including in their sexuality. Our sinful tendency is to
want to overturn the natural order that God has established in his creation and
is a result of suppressing God’s truth. Here is where the Pagan notion of
archetypes and the Christian worldview collide. The Pagan archetypes served as
a deification of the genders in their fallen state, creating gendered gods
after man’s own imagination. This is idolatry pure and simple. The Old
Testament describes this collision on many occasions. The worship of Baal and
his consort, Asherah, Moloch and other Pagan deities were constant threats to
the revelation and the worship of God. Pagan worship consisted of attempts at
manipulating the gods to intervene on the behalf of humans and their affairs
and many times this included obscene sexual or self-mutilating behavior, child
sacrifice and ritual prostitution counter to the natural and revealed law of
God. Keeping God’s law included protecting God’s creation order from
distortions of human life and sexuality.
The closest the
Bible gets to an archetypical description is when God describes himself through
an image that we can understand in human terms such as Father. God is not a
male, physical being. He is the perfect spiritual heavenly Father from whom all
other fatherhood derives. There are other related names of God, such as
Husband, or Shepherd. These names are the self-revealed names of God, the
breaking into our reality through language, descriptors that help us relate to
and grasp a part of God’s nature because of our experience. Of course, this
does not satisfy the atheist skeptic for whom God is just a projection of human
imagination. But, like the Pagan philosophers, they also need to find an
explanation for commonly held ethical beliefs that appear to be universal.
Other possible
archetypical depictions are found in the wisdom literature such as Lady Wisdom,
a personification of one of the attributes of God based on the grammatical
gender of the Hebrew word for wisdom. The Proverbs 31 woman, which portrays an
A-Z picture of wisdom applied to womanhood, is not intended to provide a
specific list of all the possible ways a woman should or could act. She is
someone whose gender is lived out in a particular culture and time and the
activities in which she engages may have been typical of women of her time,
such as spinning flax, but are no longer true of all women today. So even she
is not the archetype of a woman who embodies a kind of supra-cultural
abstraction. She is a type of ideal woman, but her idealness resides not in the
activities she performs as much as in the qualities that underlie her
undertakings: she is wise and truthful, faithful, loving, kind, compassionate,
generous, hard-working, creative, entrepreneurial, strong, etc. All of these
qualities she lives out as a woman faithful to God in a particular time
and place and culture.
A strange
archetype described in the New Testament not, per se, a gender archetype. It is
that of the reality of a heavenly tabernacle after which the earthly one was
patterned (see Hebrews 8). I mention this one only because Christ’s body is the
fulfillment of the tabernacle and temple imagery as the place where God dwells
fully and which is then transferred through the indwelling of the Spirit to the
Church, the new residence of God, filled with his presence. This body is also
the Bride, so there is a sense in which Christ’s union with his Bride is the
new tabernacle which will be fulfilled in the new heavens.
But back to our
earthly context, because we tend to think of people as interchangeable, they
are taking on more and more common “non-gendered” functions. People are seen as
functional commodities or a neutral workforce, instead of people with
identities inseparable from gender. The more we disconnect the necessity of
genders functioning in an interconnected and dependent way, the less we see
gender as core to a person’s identity. We are rapidly moving towards the
re-creating of new archetypes detached from or transcending gender altogether.
Personhood is no longer defined in terms of physical realities but in terms of
self-defined, subjective wishes. This brave (foolish?) new world has no
boundaries and will, in a certain extreme re-manufacturing of humanity, mean
the end of traditional civilization as we know it, in which men and women live
together in the most basic kinds of ways. Scientists push the limits of
separating gender functions from the persons who bear them: in vitro
fertilization, artificial wombs, men being able to breastfeed, or cloning
babies separate from any real mother or father. This dissociation of gender
functions from real persons is bound to have a catastrophic effect on human
self-understanding.
The reality
described in the Bible is that we cannot set our gender aside without
self-destructing. Everything we do, we do as gendered beings. It does not
describe our sexual identities in terms of stereotypes. There certainly are
commands given to men and women that are gender-specific, because they have to
do with the core of who they are in their difference. But the desirable
qualities that are pleasing to God, such as the fruit of the Spirit, are not
couched in terms of virility or femininity. What looks different is the
outworking of these qualities based on the gender of the person. One could go
as far as to say that there are as many ways of being a God-fearing man as
there are men, because each individual man is a type of man of his own, i.e., a
male image bearer of God, with a unique combination of natural gifts,
personality, inclinations and spiritual gifts and yet, he is called to live out
godliness at the intersection of all of these things with his biological
gender. There are as many ways of being a God-fearing woman as there are women.
Let’s take for example the quality of courage. Is courage a male or a female
quality? Well, the Bible doesn’t give us an answer to the question. But the
Bible does call individuals to courage and it has lived out differently based
on the person’s situation, calling, and gender. Take Ester for example. It took
her great courage to go before the king, risking her life to save the Jewish
people from destruction. But her courage was embodied and took place in her
particular setting as a female. Or take gentleness for example. The apostle
Paul describes himself as gentle. This does not mean he is effeminate even
though he purposefully uses languages that might seem strange, even shocking
for a “manly man” to use of himself:
“But
we were gentle among you, even as a nurse cherishes her children: So being
affectionately desirous of you, we were willing to have imparted unto you, not
the gospel of God only, but also our own souls, because ye were dear unto us.
For ye remember, brethren, our labour and travail: for labouring night and day,
because we would not be chargeable unto any of you, we preached unto you the
gospel of God” (1 Thessalonians 2:7-9). He is making
a case for himself that is reminiscent of the mediator Moses: "So Moses
asked
the Lord,
“Why
have You
brought this trouble on Your
servant? Why
have I not
found
favor
in Your
sight, that You have
laid upon me
the burden
of all these people?
Did I conceive all these people? Did I give them birth, so that You should tell
me, ‘Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries an infant?’ (Numbers 11:11)
From these
examples, you can see that the qualities of godliness are not themselves gendered,
but they are lived out, inevitably, in a gendered fashion because we are
embodied beings. Women and men can get frustrated in churches that establish
very strict rules and interpretations of manliness and womanliness that seem
outdated or culturally bound. These are in fact, stereotypes. Women must wear
skirts, cannot work outside the home and men must have short hair and always be
the bread-winners. But none of these things are based in the commands of
Scripture and may be relics of a cultural expression of the past. Churches must
constantly reexamine their teaching to make sure they are giving people the
same commands as the Bible and not unduly binding people’s consciences. There
are some things that are clear teachings in the Bible that are much more
counter-cultural than dress such as the teaching that the man is the head of
his wife and home whereas the wife is the necessary helper and life-giver. We
too are “types” of Christ and his Church in the manner in which we live out our
gender. Discipleship may therefore look quite different for a man who is
married versus a single man or for a wife and mother with small children versus
a widow in her 70s. But all have the call to follow Christ, to grow in the
fruit of the Spirit, and to apply the gospel to every aspect of their gendered
life.
Our human
genders, male and female, both come from God and are expressions of a part of
who God is. Both have an identity to bear and a task to fulfill in connection
to him and to each other. The ways each lives out a humble dependence on him
and in obedience to him will inevitably look different, but it will be a
testimony to God’s beauty and life-giving design. We don’t need to create new
tyrannical genderless archetypes that demand the sacrifice of our very life and
offspring, nor do we need to bow in enslavement to culture-bound stereotypes
that lead us down the path of legalism. We can live our lives in joyful
acceptance of the gender God gave us, looking forward to a day when our
gendered bodies will be perfectly transformed because of our union with Christ
in his resurrection. God, the eternal Bridegroom will reclaim his Bride and
enter into an eternal love relationship with her. That is the eternal reality
toward which the binary creation order points and of which our lives are now
but a faint echo. Archetypes, stereotypes and even types will disappear when
Christ is revealed as the one in whom the fullness of God dwells perfectly.
[1] Intersex individuals are in an understandable
difficult position, but this is very rare
